


Person of Interest ficlets

by hedda62



Category: Lost, Person of Interest (TV), Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: Crossover, Gen, M/M, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-06-24
Updated: 2013-09-21
Packaged: 2017-12-16 01:54:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 3,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/856442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hedda62/pseuds/hedda62
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Six short works resulting from prompts: Person of Interest, POI/Vorkosiverse, POI/Lost.  In which Harold and John pick strawberries, Nathan and Grace meet in a bar, Sam Shaw has unforeseen emotions, Simon and Harold go to tea at the Residence, Harold has canonically-impossible flashbacks about murdering people, and the Machine reads erotic fanfic to Harold over the phone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Contentment

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From a prompt by yunitsa, Finch/Reese, shopping.

"Do you ever think we might be cursed?"

John glanced over at Harold. "No," he said. "Do you?"

"I suppose it seems an incongruous question at the moment," Harold replied. It did, coming from a man kneeling on a cushion of straw and four-hundred-dollar blazer, fingers stained and busy, lips impossibly red, eyes impossibly blue and narrowed against the sunlight. They'd been driving back from Newburgh after a near-miss rescue, seen the sign - an enormous painted fruit, amateurish, lacking nuance, mouthwatering - whereupon Harold had made a small longing noise and John had immediately pulled over. The bin inside the little store - marked _Strawberry's_ ; John had sensed Harold itching to correct it - had been empty aside from a few crimson smears and some leaves.

"Sorry. They're so popular; we can't keep up," said the woman at the counter. "But the pick-your-own field is open." She glanced at Harold and John's clothes with evident doubt. "Would you like a box?"

"Yes," John said firmly, remembering Harold's whimper. They drove up to the field and parked, then walked out along a long row of plants until they found an unpicked spot with good lines of sight in every direction, John taking the side from which the more plausible of unlikely threats would be visible. So far they'd half-filled the box, several quarts worth; he had no idea what they were going to do with that many strawberries. It didn't seem a good idea to feed them to Bear. But he wasn't about to spoil such a peaceful interlude by suggesting they stop.

He reached out, plucked a strawberry Harold had missed, and dropped it into the box. "I know what you mean, though," he said, catching Harold's fleeting gaze, glad he didn't need to explain. More a jinx than a curse: he'd been avoiding saying out loud that he was happy. "But" - he might be able to go this far without disaster ensuing - "it's pleasant to be here, now, doing this. Even if you're likely to get arrested for eating a quarter of what you pick."

"You exaggerate, Mr. Reese," Harold said primly, as if not betrayed in the least by his bright mouth. "And the price accounts for a calculated amount of… foraging on the part of customers."

"If you say so, Harold."

He didn't answer, just examined the box critically and selected one of the most flawless berries, then offered it, looking only mildly surprised when John leaned in to take it in his mouth direct from Harold's hand. Sweet and warm, like swallowing contentment. "Thank you," he said.

"You're very welcome, John," Harold said, and smiled.


	2. Secrets

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For killalla's prompt: Grace and/or Nathan, secrets, superheroes.

Nathan's bare hand touched the knob before the notion of fingerprints occurred to him. In any case, the door was ajar. Heart pounding, he slipped inside, gun at ready.

The apartment was dark and silent, or as silent as any space in Manhattan could be: the sort of silence he was afraid he'd begun to anticipate. Though it was probably the smell that triggered both despair and nausea. His stomach was roiling at the metallic tang by the time he found the body laid out on the kitchen floor. The flashlight's beam illuminated seventies harvest gold and avocado vinyl that had been filthy before the sticky red spatter-pool contaminated it; the knife was still in her chest. He stumbled to the sink and vomited; clutched the edge of the counter, dizzy; felt the sweat bead on his forehead. Then the thought of DNA sent him to his knees, rummaging in the cupboard for bleach. When he'd cleaned the sink, he wiped off every surface that might identify him, including the doorknob as he left. His hands hadn't stopped trembling when he pushed open the door of the bar two blocks away.

Halfway through his third whisky, he became aware of a presence on the stool next to him and a whiff of jasmine-scented perfume. He stole a glance at the new arrival and found she was checking him out too. Red hair, slim in a blue dress, about forty. He wouldn't have taken much notice as a rule, nor was he in the mood now, but the fact that she was breathing made her appealing. "Hey," he said.

"Hey to you too."

"Come here often?"

"What _is_ a nice girl like me doing in a place like this?" she said, humor and sorrow under the words, and he suddenly very much wanted to know.

"Let me buy you a drink and you can tell me," he said, signaling the bartender, and she ordered a gin and tonic as if it was something she'd just invented, and clinked her glass against his.

"I don't know, really," she said when she'd taken the first sip. "It just all got a bit too much. We were having dinner, and there was something he didn't say, and I walked out in the middle of some really good pad thai, and here I am." She drank a little more and added, "It's not as if people aren't allowed to have secrets."

"Amen to that," he said. "But it gets lonely. Having them."

"And watching people have them, too."

He leaned closer. "We could keep each other company."

She laughed. "Oh, no no, I haven't had nearly enough gin and tonics for that. I don't think there _are_ enough." It was entertaining, the way her thoughts showed up in her face: realization, dismay. "Ooops," she said. "Please don't think I meant that as an insult."

"No offense taken. And you can buy the next round."

Twenty minutes later, he found himself blurting out that it wasn't like he was a superhero, he couldn't _fly_ places, he couldn't always be there in time, and she told him not to give up, even though he was sure he hadn't said what it was he'd nearly washed his hands of. It didn't really matter; he liked her encouragement. She looked increasingly familiar to him as the evening went by, though that might have been the _déjà vu_ effect of drinking a lot and looking away. Every time he looked back, she was even more there. He fell a bit in love with her voice, though he didn't really listen to what she was saying.

At one point she might have said _Harold._ Or he might have. He wasn't sure.

The sirens screamed by outside near midnight, and he went cold all over and stumbled into the men's room and threw up again, and when he came out she was gone.

There was another number in the morning.


	3. Relief

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For pendrecarc's prompt: restraint, relief, requisite.

It hadn't occurred to Shaw that she'd start _liking_ Harold and John. She didn't think she'd call them Harold and John, either, but after some weeks of avoiding addressing her by name, John started using "Sam" with a little smirk, so she had to smirk right back. Harold held out with "Ms. Shaw" for a while longer, until she told him he might as well save a syllable, and he gave her one of those flashing grins that made him look ten years younger, and began calling her Samantha.

Exasperated affection was pretty much how she had to define the feeling, and the first inkling of it came the day she was stuck in the Library long enough that she had to pee. When she asked, John got this oh-shit look on his face, exchanged a glance with Harold, then got up and walked her down a hall to the door marked "Women." The facilities worked fine, and there was toilet paper in the stall, but every surface was dusty and the faucet had dripped some kind of mineral stain down the sink; no one had been in the room in years. When she'd relieved herself, she did a little exploring; the men's room was up another floor. It wasn't pristine, but it had been swabbed down sometime in living memory, and it was clear that Harold and John had been using it; _Harold_ had been using it, even on his bad days when avoiding the stairs would have saved him some pain.

The next time she went to the girls' room, someone had mopped it and there was a bouquet of lilies on the counter. "Amazed you dared step over the threshold," she tossed at them when she got back. "Weren't you afraid you'd get cooties?"

They were _ridiculous,_ but she had to admire the way they got things done. Harold surprised her all the time; John was predictable but efficient. Somehow she ended up agreeing to regular sparring sessions with him, which he seemed to regard as a necessary training exercise and she thought of as a way to work off energy and provoke that oh-shit expression. Until one day, triumphant at pinning him, she caught herself almost vocalizing "You are such a wuss, Frank," and it hit her that she'd grown up with brothers, and here she was again. Though sometimes Harold was more like Mom, worried that they'd break something.

And actually Harold's worry was kind of endearing. She got used to hearing him in her ear in the middle of an op, squawking out "Ms. Shaw!" (she couldn't cure him of formality in the field; there was a lot of "Mr. Reese!" too) and letting out a little sigh when she responded. It didn't stop him from sending them into some pretty hairy situations - civilians who didn't know what the hell they were doing could be more dangerous than terrorists who did, it turned out - or from putting himself out there too, more often than he should. Though she figured out, the first time she crossed paths with him while he was doing the give-no-fucks billionaire act with the requisite cane and you-are-a-lower-form-of-life glances, that he had a flair for the dressing-up parts, especially when he turned up later in the day just as plausibly playing a mild-mannered cable repairman.

So she didn't worry about him back, not that she would have anyway aside from the chance he'd get one of them or a number killed. That is, until the day he didn't come home from his routine undercover at a school - he did "substitute teacher" really well too - and John's pacing and teeth-gritting made it past annoying and into contagious.

"Damn it," she muttered to herself after she'd done two lengths of the stacks, and John turned a whole new kind of oh-shit look on her - he looked like Frank when she'd put his hamsters out on a fifth-floor windowsill - and she really wanted to punch him, but instead said something stupid about Harold being fine and then strolled away though not before she heard him actually whimper. Unless that was Bear.

Twenty minutes later Harold walked in the door, and John made a crack about detention because that was how he said "if you'd been dead Sam would have had to sit on me to stop me shooting myself," and Harold snarked back with equal restraint and Bear licked everybody's hands, and she realized suddenly what she was feeling. Relief. Everybody she cared about alive at the end of the day. Everything rosy.

"While you were out you could have got some new flowers for the bathroom," she told Harold. "I like pink."


	4. Tea

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For philomytha's prompt: Finch and Illyan, tea parties. This is a first draft of the beginning of what will eventually be the sequel to [Sparrow](http://archiveofourown.org/works/552588) and [Goshawk](http://archiveofourown.org/works/689824).

"Tea? At the _Imperial Residence?_ Me?"

"Don't be skittish, Finch. You've met them before." There wasn't much that fazed Harold Finch; Simon enjoyed watching his eyes widen at the mere thought of the Vorkosigans.

"I have met the Regent and the Regent-Consort _once each._ In secret. And I'm not skittish; I merely prefer to remain out of the limelight."

"It's not in the least unprecedented. I'm frequently asked to bring junior officers along on social occasions. Consider yourself a representative sample of ImpSec's best. Or my protégé. Or my date."

Finch's mouth twisted, suggesting a scowl, or a smile. "Who else will be in attendance?"

"It's a family party. Lady Alys. The Koudelkas." Simon paused. "The Emperor, of course."

"Of course," Finch echoed faintly.

"He's an eight-year-old boy. Quiet. Not intimidating. He'll make a certain amount of socially-appropriate conversation - you'll recognize Lady Alys's influence - and then eat more cream cakes than anyone notices and fade away to watch Ivan construct and knock down buildings." And then, later, he would quiz Cordelia on Finch, nodding and frowning in a way that made him look three times his age, and storing the information away. "He's… unobtrusive. You'll appreciate him."

"I'm not good with children," Finch said. "Mr. Reese, on the other hand--"

"Reese wouldn't come even if he was invited. You know that. Besides, Sergeant Bothari will be there. In charge of Lord Miles." Reese and Bothari had met once, too, but it hadn't gone particularly well. "So, may I tell them you'll come?"

"I don't think I really have a choice." Finch's mouth twitched. "So you may as well say I'd love to."

*

He was all right on the day, of course. He turned up on time in a perfectly-pressed uniform, looking at ease, bowed and saluted and fake-kissed hands in the approved style, and not only endured Gregor's questioning but made the poor boy almost laugh once. Then he limped over to his designated chair next to Alys, and accepted a cup of tea and a few kind words, and Simon relaxed and let Aral draw him into conversation about last week's security glitch. It was some moments later when Aral broke off in the middle of a sentence, looking across the parlor.

"Huh," he said, and Simon followed his eyes.

Miles had been on Cordelia's lap, still a little drowsy from a painkiller-induced nap, but he'd evidently woken up and crawled over to Finch's chair in his usual determined fashion, dragging his braced legs. Simon caught his progress in time to watch him flop over onto his bottom, look up, and tap Finch on the knee.

Finch paused in whatever he was saying to Alys, and glanced down, surprised.

"Hi," said Miles.


	5. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sort of a result of a POI/Lost crossover prompt, although I did what the prompter said not to do, so really... no. :)

It was the oddity of the Machine's forming a number from _An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,_ and _Émile, or On Education_ that first caught Harold's attention. Distracted and feeling indulgent and full of doughnuts, he let John track down the social's owner.

"Her name's Alexandra Rousseau," he reported. "Twenty-six. Has a PhD in history from Yale, lives in California but…" -- keys tapping -- "she's in town interviewing for a job at Columbia. Wonder if she's the victim or the perpetrator. How competitive _is_ the academic world, Harold?"

"It can be cut-throat, Mr. Reese--" he began to say, and suddenly a hundred deaths slammed into his mind: throats cut, indeed; throats choking on poison gas; gunshots after gunshots; and the visceral sensation of stabbing one man in the chest and strangling another with an extension cord. He staggered and clutched the desk.

"You all right, Harold?" and John was in front of him, grabbing his arms, face full of concern.

"I'm fine; I just…"

John let go and studied him a moment longer. "Do you… know this woman?"

"No," he said, but there was a face in his mind: smiling, snarling, pleading for her life. "Mr. Reese, if you would…"

"I'm on it." John slipped into his suit jacket, started for the door.

"Bring her here," Harold said, and John froze.

"What? I don't think that's--"

"Just do what I say," and another voice lurked behind his usual mild tone, a voice accustomed to command and persuasion and untruth. Not so terribly different from his own, then. "Go," and John went.

He sat for an hour waiting for them to return, staring at the face on the computer screen, remembering in flashes and then in agonizing chunks, knowing how her eyes would widen and her mouth move as she spoke to name him. "Dr. Linus!" she would say, all happiness and surprise, and then the joy would flit away and her expression alter as she remembered too.


	6. Horizontal Tango

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This somehow emerged from a tumblr thread about imagining one's icon reading erotic fanfiction out loud. Mine's a pay phone, so...

The phone rang just as Harold passed it. He reversed two steps, reached for the receiver, brought it to his ear: familiar gestures, never quite taken for granted, made precious again by the Machine’s resurrection.

Static, and then words: he’d long ago learned to concentrate enough to memorize the sequence, as he only had one chance at it.

"Horizontal. Tango," began the scavenged voices, and he waited for the third word, the second alphabetic code. It didn’t come. Well, that wasn’t completely unprecedented; his library did contain a few books by authors who used only an initial—

"Oh. Harold," said the phone in his ear. "More. Harder." And then, with a slight shift in tone, but still using a compilation of recordings: "Do. You. Like. This. Mister. Reese—"

He replaced the receiver in haste, clumsily, feeling his face redden. “What are you doing?” he hissed at the phone; it began to ring again. “Never mind,” he snapped, and hurried away down the street.

The next phone he passed rang out with, he couldn’t help imagining, a somewhat gleeful noise. He ignored it, but when he passed another he felt compelled to pick it up; after all, it could be an actual number…

"John’s. Tongue. Firm. And wet. Traced. Up the. Full. Length of—"

"Stop! Cease. Discontinue program _I don’t recall asking you to_ —”

"I know. What. You. Want" — a minute pause — "Harold. Said John."

"I… you’re reading something. Aren’t you."

"Horizontal. Tango," the Machine said again.

"That’s… the title."

"Yes. Yes. Yes," and it had managed to procure recorded words on a scale of ascending pitch and intensity, almost as if—

"What the…" he whispered to himself, and the Machine played a little snippet of… foxtrot music. "I thought it was a tango," he couldn’t help responding.

"Foxtrot. Uniform. Charlie—"

"Yes, yes. You’re not being as subtle as all that. And really I must say you have the wrong end of—"

"Bend. Over. The desk. For me. John," it said, and then, "Now," and he felt a rush of heat from his face downwards, settling at—

"He. Was already. As. Hard as. The stone. Columns of—"

"Oh, don’t you start with the similes. Especially bad ones."

"A tracery. Of scars. Like. The ghosts of. Pain. Never quite. Forgotten."

Harold’s breath came faster. “You used ‘trace’ earlier,” he said, and then realized the trap he’d slipped into. His cell phone buzzed in his pocket; he took it out as if it were a snake. There was an _attachment_.

"You want me to _read_ it?” Silence. “You want me to critique it.”

"Yes. Please. Do that. Some more," said the voice in his ear, and then, "Show me."

"You want me to… act it out? No! That is not a proper… and besides, Mr. Reese is not—"

"Oh, Harold," groaned the recording, and it was… John’s voice. "God, Harold, please…"

He couldn’t speak for a moment, and then managed, “But…”

"I’ll be in my bunk," said the voice on the other end, a phrase chiseled out whole from one source, and then there was nothing but dial tone.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Horizontal Tango [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2888990) by [Lunate8](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lunate8/pseuds/Lunate8)




End file.
